Pollak: How to Evaluate the Democratic Memorandum

The memorandum composed by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee is now sitting at the White House, awaiting approval for declassification and release.

Their document is intended as a rebuttal to the original “Nunes memo,” released last Friday, which suggested the FBI had not properly informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the origins of the “Steele dossier” when it sought a warrant to spy a Trump associate.

Democrats have already responded to the Nunes memo in public. Alarmingly, they have completely ignored any concerns about the government’s encroachments on civil liberties. (Apparently, civil liberties are only important when a Republican administration is in power.)

Moreover, Democrats have argued that the FBI did, in fact, give the court enough information about the origins of the Steele dossier, and that even if it didn’t, it did not need to do so.

Even if the more ambitious claims of the Nunes memo are ultimately debunked, one thing is clear: the FBI and the Department of Justice ought to have been aware that conducting surveillance on the Republican campaign, at the instigation of opposition research by the Democratic campaign, looked very bad — especially when the latter enjoyed the support of the incumbent administration.

Perhaps the agencies simply did not expect to be scrutinized. But at the very least, they were careless about being impartial and apolitical.

We can already expect, given their recent arguments, that the Democratic memo will ignore questions of constitutional rights. But if it does not at least acknowledge that the government should have been more careful about avoiding even the appearance of political bias — especially after the Hillary Clinton email fiasco — then it should not be taken seriously at all.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.